


Another Country

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth
Genre: M/M, Oneshot, character study kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23052256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: ‘The past is another country- they do things differently there’Teacher opens his heart and in doing so, slips into the past.
Relationships: Crux/Teacher
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Another Country

Another Country

The letters come regular as a heartbeat, or waves, or the slow and steady click of the tumblers of a turning lock. Teacher has nearly a hundred, all stacked neatly in regular, yellowing piles in a box under his bed. Sometimes he lies there, in the dark, his eyes open and unseeing, and feels them like a warmth at his back.

It has been a long time since he truly felt warm. It is even longer since he slept.

Instead, he mouths the words to himself. The ones that he has gleaned from Crux, all unknowing, those tentative, halting overtures that have grown into something fragile and beautiful and alive, the tendrils of new growth over the ruins of the First House.

It began so simply. Teacher, ever curious, had written to the Ninth. He had signed it with a name that might have been his, once. 

Crux had written back.

Slowly, they came to know each other. Teacher veiled his boredom in the life of an acolyte of the First House. Crux shared the pressure of his duties as Marshall, the creeping resentment fostered by his lack of necromantic power, and the deep well of bitterness dug by years of service and fevered religion, one he cannot escape. In this, Teacher recognised some dark seed that could (in another life) have grown in his own heart. He, too, is trapped. In Crux’s still-simmering resentment, he finds some small release. 

As they grow closer, Teacher aches to tell him the truth. To show the Marshall of the Ninth what he truly is, all the people he has been. Instead, he writes of the past, or as much as he can without giving the game away. Becomes again a simple acolyte who only wishes to serve his Lord Undying.

One could love a man like that. Or so he hopes.

Once, Crux sends a spare and simple letter scratched deeply into flimsy. When Teacher holds it, he imagines the paper whispering under fingers like cold leather.

 _What is worse?_ Teacher’s fingertips trace the lines Crux has scored and imagines them imprinted upon his skin. _To do something terrible, or to do it incorrectly?_

He details the plague, swearing Teacher to secrecy even as he hints at something more. Teacher writes back something that seems, at the time, woefully inadequate. He hopes it gets lost on the way.

The others don’t know about the letters, of course. Aside from the obvious problems caused by his communication with the outside world, Teacher feels, somehow, like he’s being vaguely disloyal. 

The truth of the matter is that loyalty is as far from what Teacher is doing as one can imagine. The truth is that Teacher was born old, a myriad of souls forced into one body, and that old is not the same as _dead_. The truth is that Crux is not the first, though Teacher doesn’t know until his final letter that he will be the last.

He sends a note along with the formal letter. He thanks Crux for the correspondence and, pausing for just a moment, for the friendship. He writes of his long wait, his hermitage on Canaan House and, finally, of what he truly is. 

He signs another name. One that means more to him- the one out of a tangle of hundreds that he still calls himself.

Teacher takes that letter, and all of the many he has received from Crux, and empties the box to watch them flutter like white birds into the sea.


End file.
